Why I Think Newspapers Will Die: Part One of a Six Part Post

First of all in response to both Shel Holtz and Jay Moonah, I don’t make the statement that newspapers will die lightly.  Also, my motivation for saying it has nothing to do with hating or even mildly disliking newspapers.  Based on our having worked together at Canoe and Sun Media, Jay knows that I’m a strong proponent of helping newspapers to adapt. Why else would we have traipsed all over Canada including Grande Prairie, Alberta, where we saw a sign on Main street pointing to Alaska (now that’s north)?

Over the last five years, I’ve worked very closely with a large number of newspapers and I’ve come to a couple of realizations.  They, as an industry, have waited too long to start adapting. And more critically, their corporate structures and business models won’t allow them to change without breaking. The way I see it, newspapers have a number of weaknesses. Broadly speaking they’re split into timeliness, efficiency and cost.

Each of the four basic functions of a newspaper - content, classified advertising, display advertising and distribution are impacted by these weaknesses. That’s not to say that newspapers don’t have strengths; but those strengths, in my mind don’t outweigh the weaknesses.

Over the next few days, I will outline my views on these weaknesses and how they are impacting the industry. In addition, I’ll take a look at it from readers’ perspective. Both Jay and Shel have done a very good job of describing how the ergonomics and convenience of newspapers will keep us reading them for years to come. In my last post in the series, I hope to be able to give some justifications as to why I think readers will want to move away from newspapers.

Stay tuned for the next five posts of “Why I Think Newspapers Will Die.”:

Part Two – Editorial Content
Part Three - Classified Advertising
Part Four – Display Advertising
Part Five – Distribution
Part Six – The Reader

By Jose Leal

Comments

[Jay Higgins]

Jose,

To add weight to your observations. I just spent the last few weeks buying advertising for my upcoming consumer shows. After reviewing my customer surveys from the past five years we have found that our newspaper advertising has become less and less effective in reaching our target market of females 18-35 years old.

In 2002, 52.3% of the people surveyed stated that they hear (or read) about our event from their local newspaper. Back then we were spending approximately 50% of our advertising budget on newspapers.Today, the same survey showed that only 19.2% of our attendees found out about our shows via the local newspaper and we were still spending around 50% of our advertising budget on newspapers.

Therefore, one must conclude that newspapers have become a less effective tool in reaching 18-35 year old females over the past five years. Business like ours are forced to look at different media to cost effectively get our message out. If this trend continues, which by all measures seems certain, one can then project that within five years the chances of females who are now 13 years old picking up and reading a tradition print newspaper when they reach 18 years of age more of a fluke then a developed habit.

So, unless newspapers quickly figure out a way to attract the kids of today and create for them a reading habit, newspapers will continue to see circulation numbers tumble and advertising revenue dry up. This one demographic shift in readership will kill a newspapers business model and condemn them to the status of a 20th century relic.

[Jay Moonah]

Jose, it's interesting you bring up Grande Prairie -- I know you'll remember as I do that weekday edition of the Herald Tribune (I think it was Wednesday) that was bloated with ads and flyers, to the point where it was a comparable size to the largest and heaviest daily newspaper editions here in Toronto. I actually often site that as one specific example of why I think newspapers WILL survive in many communities for a great number of years to come -- growing places like Grande Prairie, where the local paper is still the best way to reach the broad community.

At any rate, I look forward to reading this series. I know we agree on many points about the newspaper _business_ (in fact I may even take a harsher view than you on the sad lack of innovation within the big media conglomerates) so I'll be interested to see how you extend that conversation.